I reckon most people aren’t too comfortable with the idea of punishing children for the actions of their forefathers. At least when the idea is stated explicitly. Consider Exodus 20:5-6.
Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
It’s a given that most non-religious people would not be comfortable with the idea. And yet, I think even most people whose religion considers the above as scripture would also be uncomfortable with this. Just for the hell of it, a [biased] sample of interpretations: in Judaism the rabbinic interpretation is that the punishment is only if the children continue the sins of their fathers. In Christianity, Aquinas for example gives a fairly similar answer. Whatever else is happening, at least religions are uncomfortable enough to deny this explicitly, even if they have to jump through some apologetic contortions and ignore large parts of the Bible to do so.
And yet, the implicit idea of such punishment is alive and well. There are plenty of people who still believe in the blood libel. But it goes much deeper than that. The blood libel is still an extreme example — but a lot of people still somehow identify themselves with their forefathers.
This is present in most long-standing conflicts and in most debates about grievances that happened more than one generation ago. “We” were massacred by “you”…80 or 100 or 1000 years ago. From the Holocaust to the Armenian genocide to the creation of Israel to the Partition of India to the decimation of the Mayans, the Incas, the native Americans living in what’s now the USA, the list goes on. Identifying yourself with “your” ancestors still seems to be the rule. And the assumption this carries with it is that the other side is responsible for what their ancestors did to our ancestors*. It’s still frighteningly common to hear statements like “I don’t like Turkey because they massacred the Armenians”, or some equivalent.
Firstly on why it’s wrong. Besides the dubious moral value of visiting the “sins of the fathers”, there’s a scientific problem. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents and so on. Assuming 25 years per generation, if you go back just 27 generations (ie. to the year 1295 assuming you were born around 1970) you will have 134M ancestors or 1/4 of the world population in 1295. Of course it doesn’t really work like that because people tend to marry within their communities. However, even a small amount of moving about by a few people has surprising consequences for your family tree. As discussed in a wonderful chapter of The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, your ancestors almost certainly form a far wider net than you could ever imagine. It’s certainly wider than whatever ethnicity you identify with**. The point is that there’s probably no meaningful way in which “your ancestors” refers to whatever historical group you are thinking of — and not to a whole bunch of other historical groups as well.
So the second question is why we might be prone to this bias. For this, a good explanation comes from the premise of the book Supersense by Bruce Hood***. You are sitting in a crowd and an announcer shows you a jacket, saying he will pay anyone (eg) $10 to wear it in front of everyone. Most people put their hands up to volunteer. The announcer then adds that the jacket belonged to a serial killer. The number of hands goes down significantly.
Now, as pointed out in this forum, it might be rational to forego wearing the jacket. Some damage might be done to people’s perceptions of you if they associate you with the serial killer (even unconsciously) thanks to some quirks of our psychology. But still, the basic reason still stands. People don’t want to put on the jacket largely because a large part of our brains believes the “essence” of the serial killer resides in that jacket. This is something that we’re all susceptible to, the question is how much we can suppress it. It’s probably also related to why creationism, animism or supernatural beliefs and Platonic essentialism are the “default” position for humanity and why it takes education to suppress these.
This might provide a partial answer. Intuitively, we think of nationalities as having a Platonic “essence” that somehow travels down the generations but stays intact. It stays intact probably because people have a very hard time thinking mathematically in terms of the messiness of population genetics. Seeing this essence probably helps us categorise the world and save valuable processing time. But it might just be a key ingredient in racism, as well as the silliness of identifying yourself with your forefathers, too.
*Just to clarify, I am not discussing things like reparations/compensation to address imbalances that persist today because of the original crimes. This post only concerns actual blame for the original crime.
**If you do identify with a particular ethnicity. If your family is multi-ethnic then it’s even easier to see how far the spread goes.
***I haven’t read the book but have heard Hood discuss the premise on quite a few podcasts so I feel qualified enough to mention at least that premise.
3 comments ↓
I found this very interesting. But what do you say about a people that has been more or less endogamous for over a thousand years? A (relatively) recent study demonstrated that, of those selected, Jews from various locations around the world shared more genetic material in common with each other than they shared with non-Jews in their places of birth. For somebody enamoured of the ethnic model of Jewish history, I find this encouraging.
It’s an interesting article! But it is a natural fact that children and grandchildren are indeed punished – by simple genetics – for the “sins” of the parents, and so the fact that this idea turns up in some form in mankind’s early attempt at behavioural guides is not at all surprising.
Epigenetics shows us that adults who take drugs are condemning their children to addictions and there doesn’t seem to be any way to turn these epigenetic markers off. If the adults are overly materialistic, you can also see clear degeneration in the children, so that two or three generations on, you have chaotic mental conditions from an early age arising from no apparent cause except the genetic condition of the parents. Excessively wealthy families are beset by behavioural problems in the children; you will find hardly a single case of genius from materialism-based families.
It’s well known that alcoholic excess in pregnancy causes fetal alcohol syndrome, in which the brain of the fetus is not highly organised as would usually be the case, but chaotic. The behavior problems will be around for life, because so much of whatever hard wiring is present at birth is already destroyed. The child is punished for the sins of the mother; even paternal drinking and smoking damages the sperm and therefore the genetic makeup of the child.
I am not surprised that spiritual literature, which represents man’s first intuitive delving into the nature of things long before the advent of science and analytical thought, has a primitive reference to these concepts. Of course it’s archaic, but so also were the fields of medicine, astronomy, and meteorology etc at the time! It’s not fair to expect a guide to spiritual life from 2,500 years ago to stand up to modern scrutiny when not a single other field from those days can boast this ability.
Whether anyone believes in a God or not, this idea of “the sins of the father” is an early and primitive attempt to make natural genetic behaviour comprehensible. It’s undeniable that parent behaviour directly affects children, whether you feel this is fair or not, and attempts to evade it by early Christian writers can only be a result of failing to understand the genetic link which actually makes this idea plausible. On the face of it, yes, it sounds unfair. But it’s also true, which is impressive for a 2,500 year old manuscript.
Simon — I think I mentioned that some populations are more isolated than others but unless there’s perfect isolation even a single “breach” may be enough to make most Jews descendants of most non-Jews from the outside population. This does not mean there will be a strong genetic affinity, just that a person contributed to descent — but it’s the coupling of descent with affinity that I think contributes to the original [IMO] fallacy of identifying with your ancestors.
Iain — I’m not aware of any reason to think that the Bible’s authors knew anything about genetics over and above the observations made by pastoralists of that era and that this verse has anything to do with these biological mechanisms — or with punishment as some metaphor for a natural process.
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